Network users grow increasingly dependent on distributed computing environments and wide area computer networks to accomplish critical tasks. Indeed, a wide variety of business applications are deployed across intranet, extranet and Internet connections to effect essential communications with workers, business partners and customers. As the number of users, applications and external traffic increases, however, network congestion ensues, thus impairing performance of business application. Network managers, therefore, are constantly challenged with distributing inefficiently packed data across the network in order to align network resources with business priorities and applications. Network priorities sometimes require improved data compression and other network optimization technologies to improve data flow.
Data compression and other technologies that optimize or reduce traffic volume can be deployed to improve efficiency and performance of a communication network and ease congestion at bottleneck points. For example, implementing data compression where applicable can improve network performance by reducing the amount of bandwidth required to transmit a given block of data between network devices along a communications path. Data compression can be implemented in routers without altering client or server systems, or software applications executed therein, to reduce bandwidth requirements along congested portions of a communications path. For example, tunnel communication techniques, like those used in Virtual Private Network (VPN) implementations, establish logical channels through which network traffic may be transmitted by transforming (e.g., encapsulating) data upon entering a first network device in a communications path and restored to substantially the same state upon leaving a second network device.
In view of the foregoing, it is beneficial to provide methods and systems that detect compressibility of data packets where possible and then compress the data packets for transmission across the network over a logical or physical channel.